Politician and polemicist Alan Keyes was among the speakers at a CPAC panel titled “Stopping the Progressive Drift of Evangelical Voters,” which was sponsored by the group Sovereign Nations. A Sovereign Nations flyer promoting the CPAC event described the group as “Preparing Gladiators for the Arena of Ideas.”

The most glaring thing missing from the presentations, given the session’s title, was any data or other evidence of a progressive shift among evangelical voters, particularly white evangelicals, who voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and who remain his most loyal supporters. What concerned the speakers is the fact that some prominent evangelical leaders are urging the church to take on issues like systemic racism, or to view injustice through a lens of “intersectionality,” which these men see as the tools of anti-Christian postmodernists out to deconstruct the evangelical church as a means of furthering their deconstruction of American society.

Ascol is a Southern Baptist minister who heads an organization called Founders Ministries, which encourages “the recovery of the gospel and the biblical reformation of local churches.” A recent post on the group’s website discusses “the lies of feminism” and calls intersectionality “a humanistic religion.” Ascol wrote last year that Martin Luther King, Jr. was “a known woman abuser and a serial adulterer” and suggested that it was wrong for the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to sponsor a conference named after King.

At CPAC, Ascol said that the devil “has effectively enticed many churches to welcome godless ideologies into their environments. And he’s done it through the Trojan horse of what is commonly called social justice. In the name of racial reconciliation, honoring women, showing love and respect for the sexually confused, evangelicals are welcoming in ways of thinking that undermine the very teachings of the word of God…”

Ascol said Cultural Marxism is a “new religion” and an “all-out assault on biblical Christianity.” He complained that Southern Baptist writers who talk about “Woke Church” are promoting this “new pagan religion.” He warned that more and more church agencies and institutions will be overrun with “godless ideologies” if “we don’t stand against it.”

Next up was Josh Buice, who echoed the warning that “many evangelicals are replacing Christianity with this new religion, this new social justice type of movement.” Buice argues that systemic racism is not a problem in U.S. culture today, much less in the evangelical church. Buice said recently on his twitter feed that “in evangelical circles we’ve replaced theology with victimology. #Social Justice.”

“This last presidential election demonstrated that conservative evangelical votes do actually matter,” he said at CPAC, warning that intersectionality is a methodology designed to shift churches hard to the left by replacing “theology with victimology.” He called intersectionality a “dangerous monster” and a “political cancer” that must be defeated.

Buice quoted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying “Today is a big day for people who have left behind,” which he called “Marxist intersectionality code language.” Conversation within the SBC about women’s empowerment is also, he said, an example of such “code language.”

But there’s far more at stake than a voting bloc. It’s not just about statues being removed. It’s about souls being damned. It’s not just about a voting bloc shifting to the left. It’s about civilization as we know it being destroyed. The liberals want our great nation. The devil wants our souls and civilization as we know it is under intense attack. We’re in serious trouble in our churches and our denominations. And in this great nation that we call America. So the question remains, what will you do about it? Don’t just sit there and surf social media about social justice. Stand up, speak up and do something.

In his CPAC speech, Keyes denounced “identity politics” for encouraging people to view themselves as victims rather than in terms of the courage and strength that people like his parents had to overcome whatever brutality they faced. He warned that “Marxist ideology” would only lead to an effort at “mutual annihilation” between “a bunch of people on one side with broken hearts and a bunch of people on the other side with broken heads.”

His understanding of who he is, he said, is not an identity given to him by his oppressor or propagandizer, but “the Lord my God.”

And so I remain the master of Myself, by virtue of my knowledge of the true source of my identity, the master of my fate, beyond oppression, beyond victimization, and beyond the manipulation of those who wish that I should join in the combat unto death, so that they may live in a world without me in it.

Keyes then took a hard turn, saying that the same people who “propagandize the world with this superficial garbage” are the same people who think that the planet’s carrying capacity is less than a billion people.

How many people in the world today? How many people? 7 billion, I think close to about that… how do you get from 7 billion people down to less than a billion? Well, I suppose you’re gonna have to kill people or let them die because procreation doesn’t really permit you to take that big number seven and cut it back without a lot of work.

So you must either kill them or they must kill themselves. Or they must kill their offspring or the world must be filled with epidemics and cataclysms that kill them off. Isn’t it funny that we live in a world now where all the creative elitists who spread this bunk, teach us to assume that the world will be filled with epidemics, teach us to assume that the weapons of mass destruction will destroy us hither and thither and yon. Teach us to assume that there will be no life but for those who are the hangers on of their power. For only power matters.

Keyes said the word needs to get out to generations now being victimized by “self-serving intellectuals” who are the tools of would-be socialist totalitarian tyrants “who want to take over our nation and take over the world and repress the natural resources that God has give us to resist that form of victimization.” We must, he said choose “whom we will serve—God or the forces of our world that seek to destroy us.”

Keyes said that he learned to love America because of the Declaration of Independence, because it is premised on the fact that we were all created “in the image and likeness of God.”

“There is no way they can overpower us, when the source of who we are has nothing to do with their power, and everything to do with the power they can never touch, whose results they can never change,” he said, and that’s why the U.S. became the greatest nation in the history of the earth.

If you’re a fan of Keyes’ brand of politics and oratory, you may want to mark your calendars for a “special teaching series” with Keyes that Sovereign Nations is holding at the Trump International Hotel in May, when Keyes will deliver a “historic line-by-line exposition of the Declaration of Independence.”

O’Fallon, one of the statement’s creators and initial signers, wrote his own blog post on the statement. He complained that, while the evangelical church “has been a massive conservative force over the past 50 years,” evangelical denominations, churches, and seminaries have more recently been “focusing on teaching their future pastors postmodern concepts such as critical race theory and intersectionality.” Churches, O’Fallon wrote, “are pushing progressive agendas along with the teaching of unconscious bias training and the deceptive idea of ‘white privilege.’”

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